TimArcher.com A blog about technology...and more.

Tonight I ran across the following piece written by Isaac Asimov, and felt is was worth sharing:

What is intelligence, anyway? When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me. (It didn't mean anything. The next day I was still a buck private with KP - kitchen police - as my highest duty.)

All my life I've been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I'm highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think so too. Actually, though, don't such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests - people with intellectual bents similar to mine?

Recently I added a fraud alert to my credit report to see what exactly it does.

I went to http://www.experian.com/fraud and added an Initial Security Alert (90 days) to my credit report. Surprisingly, this was very easy to do, and only took me about 10 minutes. In any case, I got a free peek at who's been viewing my credit, what accounts I have open, etc. I was able to verify that there are no other accounts in my name (thankfully, there were none), and I even submitted a dispute that a card that I am no longer an authorized purchaser on is still listed in my credit. Within 2 weeks that card was removed from my credit report. It is important to note that you will not be shown your FICO score when submitting a fraud alert. You can pay a small amount to have it displayed though.

I apologize for the lack of posts, but this past week has been a week of hell dealing with plumbing...

First off, I found out that my shower had a leak last Monday. I decided to replace the fixture, but it was some goofy fixture that was actually all attached inside of the walls and the job required the walls to be opened up. I decided to not do that one myself and hired a plumber. I called 5 different plumbers, and only 1 decided to call me back and bid on the job. They were able to get it done, as well as extract $670 from my wallet.

Now, today (Sunday), I found out my garbage disposal has been leaking. A bunch of water has started ruining the finish of the base of the cabinet under the sink. Oh yeah, and my favorite part was the nasty smell and slimy fungus growing under the sink from the water that has been dripping for who knows how long.

I just got a new computer and had to figure out how to bring over all of my Firefox bookmarks and saved passwords over to it from my old computer.

For reference, my old and new computers are both running Windows XP, and my old computer is running Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3.

In order to bring over all of my personal settings to my new computer I performed the following actions:

1. First install Firefox on the new computer.
2. On your old computer, navigate to the directory containing all of your personal settings. We want to copy this directory from your old computer to your new one.
   

Well, it’s been about one month now since I started this blog, and so far all I’ve done are tech posts. However, since I have never really introduced myself or described why this blog was created, I will use today’s post to do just that.

It all started back in January of 2006. I saw the domain timarcher.com become available and since my name is in fact Tim Archer, I thought it would be a good idea to register the domain. Then it sat idle for over a year as I was in the middle of my MBA program and had no time to do anything with it. Besides, I had no idea what I should even do with the domain anyway.

        Over the last few years a new genre of computer gaming has evolved referred to as Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG). Within these games, game players design their own fictional character (such as a wizard), which they then immerse into a virtual world containing millions of other people who have done the same. The players control the actions of their characters and guide them throughout this virtual world completing various tasks, venturing on quests, trading their treasures, earning and spending virtual money, and interacting with other players. With the growing popularity of these games many questions are raised as to what laws, if any, govern this virtual world, especially since this is an environment that is not under the control of any given government, or within the borders of a given territory.

               John P. Eckert is credited with being a coinventor of the first electronic digital computer. While he was a research associate at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania, he collaborated with J.W. Mauchly in designing and constructing the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC). Eckert used the basic digital concepts in designing ENIAC which John V. Atanasoff had used earlier in a device he had built in the 1930s. By using these digital concepts, Eckert was able to substitute electronic components for mechanical ones. This change in design made ENIAC about 1,000 times faster than the previous generation of relay computers.

Heres a shameless plug for my friends blog: FilmoreGroup.com

It has alot of random information, some funny, some serious, and then a bunch that is in between.

Sure those ads from your ISP tell you what your maximum connection speed will be, but have you ever wondered what it really is at any point in time?

I just stumbled across a nifty little website that allows you to test your Internet Connection upload and download speeds - The Speakeasy Speed Test.

To test your own connection speed, go to the following URL:
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

Simply click on the location closest to you (I chose Chicago, IL), and then let the site do its work. After about a minute it showed the results of my connection speed test:

Today I wanted to create the favicon.ico file for my blog. I had a PNG version of the graphic I wanted to use, and I figured I'd quickly use Paint Shop Pro to open it and save it to a .ico file. No dice, PSP does not save files in the .ico format.

So, my next step was to ask a co-worker who has Adobe Photoshop to do it for me. I figured that this would be a done deal and he'd email me back the .ico file I desired. However, he also walked up to me and told me Photoshop can't do it.

What is so special about the .ico file format that these major programs can't create them?

In any case, I did not want to install another program on my PC. A quick search on the web turned up this site:

Welcome to timarcher.com, a website mostly about my personal interests, hobbies, likes, and dislikes.

Right now I'm trying to get this website working (using Drupal), and more importantly, figure out what to publish. Since I am a software developer, I imagine that most of my posts will be to share some tips and tricks that I have come across in career.

Stay tuned for more posts in the coming weeks. We'll see what type of ride this site takes us on!

Tim